Why Is There So Much Talk About Millennials and Baby Boomers
The phrase "OK Boomer" is perceived — and ofttimes intended — as a cross-generational dismissal, a way for young people to snipe: "Never listen to anyone over 50."
But millennial journalist Jill Filipovic, author of the new book, "OK Boomer, Permit'southward Talk: How My Generation Got Left Backside" (One Signal Publishers/Atria), out Tuesday, claims the phrase is more than a form of defense than offense.
" 'OK Boomer' is more than simply an imperious insult," she writes. "Information technology's frustrated millennial autograph for the means the aforementioned people who created so many of our bug now pin the blame on us."
In the book, Filipovic takes us through numerous areas of modernistic life, explaining through statistics and personal stories why millennials — those born betwixt 1980-1996, who brand up the nation's largest age group — confront tougher economical challenges than their parents' generation — the baby boomers, born between 1946-1964.
"Millennials have faced unique hardships that ready our generation apart," Filipovic writes. "We're simply now starting to grasp the degree to which we have gotten screwed. And we're responding with desperation and sometimes anger. That'due south where 'OK Boomer' comes from: It'south a final, frustrated dismissal from people suffering years of political and economical fail."
While the oldest millennial is at present 40 years old, Filipovic notes that this generation remains underrepresented in our government.
"About 80 percent of senators and two-thirds of the US House of Representatives are 55 or older. Just seven percent of representatives in Congress are millennials. There is not a single millennial in the US Senate.
"Boomers, well into their sixties and seventies, retain significant command over American politics. Millennials haven't enjoyed our fair share of political influence, which means we haven't seen the kind of investments we need. And boomers aren't loosening their grip anytime shortly."
Much of Filipovic'south book illustrates how wealth disparity between the generations is always-increasing.
"Millennials brand upwardly close to a quarter of the US population, but concord just three per centum of the wealth," she writes. "When boomers were our age, they held 21 percentage."
One cause of this is the price of college education: Millennials face individual educational activity costs 300 percentage higher than boomers did, and around 1 in 10 millennials carries student loan debt in the six-figure range. By comparison, she writes that "when the average boomer was a young thirty-something, their educational debts amounted to just $2,300 in today's dollars."
She notes that Ronald Reagan, "the first boomer-elected president," helped cause this crisis by slashing the Higher Education Deed, which had made it easier for students to qualify for and receive demand-based aid.
Equally a result, most students became dependent on loans — and this, combined with greater tuition costs, helped spur the financial crisis they're in today.
"Boomer households today are worth 12 times as much as millennial ones," Filipovic writes. "The average millennial is worth only $8,000 — less than adults of any generation in three decades."
And as millennials' educational costs accept exploded, their task opportunities take dried upwardly, she writes.
"Boomers were the terminal generation to enter a job market offer living-wage blue-neckband work. In Rust Belt towns, fifty-fifty in the mid-1960s, yous could graduate high school straight into a factory task that would keep a nuclear family unit afloat," Filipovic writes, citing the nationwide closures of factories and mines, the source of "America's terminal well-paying blueish-collar jobs," as one cause for these job losses.
As a result, millennial earnings accept plunged compared to previous generations. Adjusted to 2016 dollars, boomer households led by a male breadwinner averaged $56,100 in almanac income in 1978, while comparable millennial households, at the same age, fabricated just $49,500 in 2014. Overall, boomer households in this demographic were just $x,000 behind the national average, while millennial households in the same cohort were closer to $25,000 backside the average.
The 2008 recession further compounded the trouble.
"The shock of unemployment translated into a 7 percent loss of earnings for infant boomers. Millennials lost well-nigh double that amount," she writes. "And boomers saw significant recovery afterward. Past 2010, their losses had already shrunk by 65 percent. Millennials didn't see a comparable bounce back … [due to] limited employment histories, picayune to no savings, and a vanishing social rubber internet."
On top of all this, millennials too lack the wealth-edifice benefits boomers came to expect, peculiarly since companies began slashing employee perks afterwards the 2008 recession. A Pew Charitable Trusts analysis found that "while nearly 70 pct of working boomers had access to employer-sponsored retirement plans in 2012, more than 40 percent of working millennials aren't eligible to participate in retirement plans — because their company doesn't offer ane, because they piece of work likewise few hours to qualify, or because they oasis't been employed long enough."
At the same time, owning a home has become increasingly out of reach for most millennials.
"The cost to build homes has increased so much since the [2008 financial] crisis, it's more than hard for millennials to find affordable homes," Jung Hyun Choi, a research associate with the Housing Finance Policy Center at the Urban Institute, says in the book.
As builders began focusing on more than expensive projects, there were "only fewer affordable starter homes to go around, making all of them more than expensive," Filipovic writes.
When coupled with deflated incomes, fledgling millennial homeowners have paid "almost 40 percent more for their first homes than boomers did."
Rents, too, take climbed: "In 1970, the median monthly rent in the Usa was a little more than than $600 a month, in 2019 dollars," Filipovic writes. "Past 2019, information technology had doubled, to more than $1,300 a calendar month."
When boomers were 34 years old, close to half of them owned homes, according to Filipovic, but for millennials at the same age, that figure is only 37 percent.
Considering of all this, millennials are "less probable to own a home than any previous cohort except the Greatest Generation, who came of historic period at the close of the Great Low," she writes.
In the meantime, Filipovic argues that engineering has exacerbated millennial woes. While every generation sees tech advancements over their lifetime, today'due south changes are more confusing and pernicious than unifying and hopeful.
"While boomers besides grew upward in an era of rapid technological advocacy, the innovations of their time came with a sense of wonder and optimism: From the dawn of color television to the space race to the invention of the microwave oven, boomer childhoods were marked past advances that promised better futures, and these discoveries often delivered," she writes.
"Millennials, on the other hand, have seen the groovy promises of digital technology and connection quickly turn sinister."
Filipovic notes how the promise of a smarter, better-informed populace thanks to the Internet has "been thoroughly dashed as bad actors take exploited these tools for personal gain," resulting in increased bullying, misinformation and "the weaponization of rhetoric that fuels bigotry, violence, slaughter and ethnic cleansing."
'The average millennial is worth just $8,000.'
- millennial journalist and author Jill Filipovic
And despite social media's ability to connect us, millennials — the "heaviest adult social media users" — are a lonely generation.
"Twenty-two percent of millennials, but just 14 percent of Gen Xers and 9 per centum of boomers, listed the number of friends they have as zero," Filipovic writes.
"When [around] a quarter of millennials say they don't have a single acquaintance across their family members or their partner — not fifty-fifty friends, acquaintances — yous have to wonder what's going on. Not even one in x boomers says the same."
Maybe as a result, millennials are more likely to suffer from low than older generations.
"Older millennials may exist the nearly depressed 30-somethings in American history," Filipovic writes, noting that due to a larger incidence of drug overdoses and suicides, millennials have a mortality rate xx percent higher than Gen Xers at the same age.
"A Blue Cross Blue Shield assay of health information found that we are significantly more likely to endure from a major depressive disorder than Gen Xers were in their mid-thirties."
To compound the trouble, millennials are as well less probable to exist insured. "I in 5 millennials struggling with major depression — a status that can shave well-nigh a decade off one's life — goes without handling," Filipovic writes. "And 85 percent of people with low are too struggling with at least one serious additional issue, whether substance corruption or chronic hypertension or Type 2 diabetes or a range of other afflictions."
"Older millennials written report higher rates of substance corruption, high blood pressure, Crohn's disease and colitis, and college cholesterol than Gen Xers did at the aforementioned historic period. By dissimilarity, baby boomers are the longest-living generation in American history."
Despite all their struggles, there is ane area in which millennials might enjoy an advantage over their boomer predecessors: love and marriage.
While millennials marry after on average — almost 40 percent of boomers were married by age 30, just simply 20 percentage of millennials were — their unions are mostly more stable than boomers'.
"If annihilation really sets boomer marriages apart, information technology's divorce — they practise a lot of it," Filipovic writes.
"Older boomers brought the nation a glut of divorce in the 1970s and a national divorce rate that peaked in 1980. While younger generations of Americans divorce less oftentimes, boomers merely keep splitting up into middle and even sometime age," she writes.
Filipovic claims that the rise in equal rights has helped deter divorce among millennials.
"Millennials accept made matrimony more egalitarian and more stable," she writes. "We are more open up-minded and more likely to seek love beyond racial and religious lines … Millennials are likewise the outset generation in America to hitting the average marriage age with the correct to marry a person of any gender."
Millennials are also healthier than other generations when it comes to sexual health.
"According to psychology professor Jean Twenge'southward written report on sexual behavior, we take fewer sexual partners (eight on boilerplate) than our Gen X predecessors (ten), and fewer than our Boomer parents (eleven). We have far fewer unintended pregnancies, births, abortions and sexually transmitted infections than the generation earlier us, and as we reached machismo, rates of unplanned pregnancies hit 30-yr lows."
In short, Filipovic argues, millennials have been unfairly stigmatized as coddled snowflakes whose participation trophies take left them unable to face up reality. In fact, they're just misunderstood, while also facing the very aforementioned criticisms in one case lobbied at the boomers.
"Throughout the 1960s, '70s and '80s, writer afterward writer eviscerated baby boomers equally a generation of self-absorbed bellybutton gazers, infatuated with self-discovery and, primarily, themselves," she writes.
"I present this non to pigment the generation with a broad brush just to say that perceptions of modify are remarkably cyclical. Every generation looks at the young and chafes at the idea that they are doing things differently," she concludes. "Every generation seems to have a item kind of amnesia and forgets that they, too, were in one case the kids-doing-it-wrong."
Source: https://nypost.com/2020/08/08/why-millennials-distaste-for-baby-boomers-is-justified/
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